There is a moment — usually within seventy-two hours of the wire hitting your account — when the pre-seed cheque starts to feel less like an enabler and more like a clock. From here, you have roughly eighteen months of runway, two milestones to hit before the seed conversation is even credible, and a portfolio company calendar of investor updates that, for some reason, you now owe people. This piece is for the founder in that seventy-second hour.
Below is the 100-day playbook we hand to every Pratyaya company on day one. It is opinionated. It is wrong for some companies. It is closer to right than the absence of a plan, which is the default.
The shape of the hundred days
Days 1–100, by focus area
1–30
Foundation
Cap table, banking, ops, first hires, write the doc
31–60
Customer discovery
Volume of conversations, sharper ICP, first design partners
61–90
Build velocity
Shipping into customer hands weekly, learning loops
91–100
Re-plan
Update the 18-month plan against what you learned
Indicative founder-time allocation per phase. The phase boundaries are guidance, not rules.
Days 1–30: foundation
Most founders waste days 1–30 by either over-investing in 'setting up the company' (legal, finance, tools, brand) or under-investing in it (just shipping). The right split is neither — it is to crush the operational basics in 10 working days, then return to product. Below is the punchlist.
- Bank account opened and SAFEs / SHA fully executed and filed.
- ESOP pool created, board composition decided (typically founder + investor observer at pre-seed).
- Payroll, statutory compliance, and accounting onboarded with one vendor — do not assemble best-of-breed yet.
- First two hires named, signed, and start-date confirmed. Pre-seed is two hires, not five.
- A 600–900 word internal company doc that states the problem, the customer, the wedge, the 12-month bet, and the things you will not do. Update it monthly.
On the internal doc: this is the most underused founder tool we know of. The act of writing 600 words on the company forces precision that no deck and no investor pitch will. It also becomes the artifact you and your hires return to every time the question 'is this on-strategy?' comes up.
Days 31–60: customer discovery
Customer-discovery work compounds. By day 60, you should have had — and taken notes on — at least 40 customer conversations across your hypothesised ICP. The notes are the asset. Do not delegate this stage to anyone other than the CEO.
Customer conversations / week, target vs typical
- Target
- Typical
The target curve assumes founder-led discovery. The typical curve reflects what we see most pre-seed founders actually do in their first sixty days.
The gap between target and typical is mostly explained by founders thinking they need a polished demo or product before having conversations. They do not. The right second-week customer conversation is built around a notion doc and four screenshots. Be the founder who asked early.
Days 61–90: build velocity
By day 60 you should have sharpened the ICP to a sentence and named three to five design partners. Days 61–90 are about putting product into those design partners' hands every week and watching what they do with it. Two principles to commit to in writing on day 60:
- Ship weekly to design partners. Even if the change is small. The cadence is the product.
- Instrument the product from day 61. You cannot retro-fit observability later; the conversations you have on day 95 about what is working depend on the events you started capturing on day 62.
If days 61–90 produce a tight loop of (ship → use → learn → ship), you have built the most valuable asset a pre-seed company can have at this stage: an internal habit. Most early companies do not have this; the ones that do compound differently for the next two years.
Days 91–100: re-plan
At day 91, sit down with the founding team and your lead investor for a 90-minute re-plan. Update the company doc, the 18-month plan, the milestones for seed, and the things you have decided to stop doing. The re-plan is not a status update — it is a decision meeting.
“The seed round is not raised at month eighteen. It is decided at day 91, when you commit in writing to the 12 things you will and will not have done by then.”
What we promise our companies during the hundred days
- A 60-minute call in week 2 to walk through this playbook against your specific company.
- Two hires sourced from our personal networks, on average, in the first 90 days.
- Five customer intros pre-screened to your ICP, executed within the first 30 days.
- A re-plan session at day 91, scheduled the day the cheque is wired.
The hundred days are short. The compounding is long. Treat the playbook above as a starting hypothesis, then deviate ruthlessly where your specific company demands it. The goal is not to follow the script. The goal is to know what you are choosing not to do.